16. Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Jessica
This trip to the archive is pretty boring, and for that I'm grateful.
The original approval had me going into the restricted archive alone, with Freya waiting upstairs. After the kidnapping, apparently nobody thinks that's a good idea anymore. The amended approval lets Freya and Jon come in with me.
The archive is in an old stone building with a much newer one attached to the back. We surrender our bags and phones at the lockers and follow the custodian downstairs. At the last door, she puts her palm on the reader and a light above it turns green.
"All three of you, look at the camera."
We crowd into the marked space in front of the door. There's a click from somewhere above us.
"That's your entry record," she says. "You'll do it again when you leave."
She puts her palm on the reader a second time. The lock releases. We go through.
It shuts behind us, and the lock catches.
My body reacts before I can stop it. Shoulders up. Weight back. Hands open.
"Jessica?" Freya says.
"Give me a second."
She does. Jon is beside me. He doesn't touch me or ask if I'm all right. He just waits.
I look at the room instead. Tables. Shelves. Nothing remotely like the place where they held me. I let out a breath and drop my shoulders.
"Okay."
Jon looks at me.
"I'm good."
The custodian waits until I'm moving again before she leads us to the first table.
It's a reading room. Long tables, lamps with green glass shades, shelves going up into a tall ceiling. The air is cool and smells like paper.
"Before anything comes out of a box," the custodian says, "you'll wash your hands at that sink and dry them completely.
No gloves. They make it harder to feel what you're doing, and these pages tear easily.
One document at a time. Nothing goes on top of it.
Not your notes, your pencil, or your elbows.
Handle the pages by the edges, and don't force anything flat. "
"What if it's already folded?"
"If it opens easily, fine. If it doesn't, you stop and call me. Same if a page sticks, feels brittle, or looks damaged. You don't help it."
Freya nods. "If I break something, do I tell you before or after I leave the country?"
The custodian looks at her. "Before."
"Understood."
"Sit anywhere. I'll bring the first tray."
I don't know exactly what I expected to find here. Something about the betrayal, probably. Something that would tell me what actually happened.
What comes out on the first tray is a receipt for window glass.
Four panes for the east range of a house I've never seen, delivered in a month I can't pronounce in the old spelling, paid in full, signed for by a man called Bernt.
Under that is a schedule of repairs to a roof.
Then an appointment for somebody's granddaughter as under-housekeeper at what the document calls the second house.
There's a note beside her pay. She gets the same amount as the woman she's replacing.
I read that one twice.
"This isn't what I expected."
"What did you expect?" Freya asks.
"I don't know. Treason?"
Freya looks up. "Give it time."
I look back at the window-glass receipt. "They bought windows."
"Apparently."
It's such a stupidly ordinary thing that I can't stop looking at it.
"No, I mean—" I stop, because she's right and I'm not saying it properly. "Somebody argued about the pay. There's a note where they argued about it and then somebody decided in her favor."
"That's what most of a House is," Jon says. He's reading a page of accounts with his finger hovering above the line. "People working. Paying bills. Fixing things."
The second tray is correspondence, and the third is land records.
There's a woman who signs her letters with only an initial and apparently runs three properties.
There's a steward who writes to another steward twice, in increasingly short sentences, about seven men and where they're supposed to sleep.
There's a list of names for a winter household, and ninth on that list is a girl with my grandmother's name.
It means nothing. It was a common name, and my grandmother was born two centuries later on the wrong continent. I write it down anyway.
On one of the land transfers, pressed into wax the color of old brick, is the seal. A direwolf above four peaks. Under the peaks is a key, tiny enough that I almost miss it.
I've seen the same design over a doorway at the refuge, worn down until you have to know what you're looking at. I've never seen it on an actual Fourth House document.
I stare at it longer than I need to.
"Right hand," Jon says quietly.
"I know." I'd reached across with the left without thinking. My shoulder is better, but raising that arm still pulls in all the wrong places. I switch hands.
The Great Betrayal records come out after that. They take up two trays.
This is the part I thought would be easy.
For months I've been finding reasons not to trust the history I was handed when I entered this world.
The Fourth House wasn't gone. The line didn't die.
Records survived that weren't supposed to exist. Every answer I've found has made the official story a little less certain.
So some part of me expected this to be the same. That once I got close enough to the actual records, they wouldn't show Luftemilen moving against the other Great Houses. That the official story would start to fall apart here, too.
But that's not what I'm finding.
There are records of men being moved between holdings, out of season, in numbers that don't match the work the holdings had.
Provisions are going the same direction.
There are routes drawn between the northern properties with the passes marked and the timing noted, and the same handwriting appears on a signed supply schedule.
And there are two sealed messages, both short, both about something the writer calls the arrangement. Neither says what the arrangement is.
At the front is the official summary, laying all of it out in order. Men moved. Provisions moved. Routes surveyed. Messages exchanged. The conclusion: Luftemilen was preparing to take by force what it couldn't obtain by vote.
I read it again.
"This doesn't look made up," I say.
"No," Jon says.
"So it might have happened."
"The men were moved. The supplies were moved. The maps are real. None of that tells us why."
"The summary does."
"The summary tells us what someone thought it meant."
I look back at the two messages. "They could have been right."
"They could have," Jon says.
At the other end of the table, Freya has been putting the ordinary Luftemilen documents in date order — receipts, appointments, land records.
"Jessica. Come look at this."
I get up. "What?"
Freya points to the seals. "Look at these. Their seal changes." She pulls the magnifier closer. "Look at the early ones. The outer ring goes all the way around."
It does. A clean circle around the direwolf and the peaks.
"Now this one. Thirty-odd years later." She moves the magnifier over. "There's a break in the ring. Up and to the right."
I have to look twice before I see it. A gap in the circle, no wider than a thread.
“The matrix was damaged at some point,” Freya says.
“The what?”
“The metal stamp they pressed into the wax. That's the matrix. See the break in the outer ring? Once that damage was there, every seal made with that matrix should have the same break.”
“How do you know it's the same one?”
“Because of these.” She points to the documents she's arranged after that date. “Every one has the break in the same place. And look here.” She moves to one of the later seals. “It's a little wider.”
Jon comes around the table. “From wear?”
“That's what it looks like.”
I look down the line. The break appears and then stays there, getting a little worse as the years pass.
"That's actually pretty cool."
"I told you."
I look back at the two messages. "Freya, where do those sit on your line?"
She follows my eyes. Her smile disappears.
"Wait."
"What?"
"The two messages about the arrangement. They're dated. Where are they?"
Freya goes back for them, one at a time, and sets them into the line by date. Both fall years after the break first appears.
All three of us look. The outer rings on both seals are clean.
"Hmm," Jon says.
"Say something better than hmm."
"There are other explanations." He bends closer to the first seal. "A House could have more than one matrix. They could have replaced this one. There could have been a spare that wasn't used often enough to show the same wear."
"Do we know if Luftemilen had another one?"
"No."
"Can we find out?"
"Maybe. If another matrix was made or repaired, there may be a payment for it somewhere in the accounts."
I look at the two messages again. "So this doesn't mean they're fake."
"No."
"It means their seals don't match the other Luftemilen seals from the same period."
"That's what you know," Jon says.
I write it down. "Freya, you weren't looking for that."
"I was looking at seals." She's gone a little pale. "I like seals."
We keep reading. Jon spends most of the next hour in the correspondence between the other Houses. Eventually he turns the summary toward me and points above the page.
"This is why I've been reading those."
"Why?"
"The summary says the other Houses were already concerned about Luftemilen before the incident. I wanted to see what they were saying at the time."
"And?"
He puts a single sheet beside the summary. "This came out of an Ardent office. It describes Luftemilen's movements as preparation for a seizure of power."
"Okay."
"Look at the date."
I do. Then I look at Freya. "Where's the incident on your timeline?"
Freya checks. Jon checks the date on his sheet again.
"This is seven weeks earlier," he says.
"Before the thing that's supposed to have made everyone think Luftemilen was planning something."
"Seven weeks before."
Soren gave me his House's record over breakfast this morning. The evidence against Luftemilen reached House Soren through an Ardent office. On top of it was a page in his own handwriting, saying where it came from and what it doesn't prove.
"People decide things early and turn out to be right," I say.
"They do."
"Or they decide first and then everything they find looks like proof."
"That too."
"And we don't know which this is."
"No."
We keep reading. At about half past four, I finally ask the obvious question.
"How do you know what's supposed to be in here?"
The custodian looks up from her desk. "The inventory."
"Whose inventory?"
"The one made when the material was received. Every case number in this collection traces back to it."
"Can I see it?"
"You've been looking at parts of it all day. The lists at the front of the trays come from it."
"I mean the original."
She takes off her glasses. "Yes. But I turn the pages."
"Fine."
It takes her twenty minutes. What she brings back isn't just the inventory. There are several loose sheets filed with it from the receiving office.
She takes us through the inventory first. It's long, orderly, and mostly exactly what we've already been looking at. Then she turns to the loose sheets.
Freya stops her on the second one. "Wait."
The custodian leaves the page where it is. There are four lines on it, written quickly by whoever received the Luftemilen material.
I read the third one. Then I read it again.
A portion of the material had already been removed before the inventory began.
"What does that mean?"
"Removed by whom?" Jon asks.
"It doesn't say."
"To where?"
"It doesn't say that either."
The custodian comes around the desk and reads the entry herself.
"I've run this collection for seventeen years," she says. "I'd have told you that inventory was complete. I've told the Council it was."
"But it isn't."
"No."
Freya goes back to the first sheet and starts reading from the top.
"It doesn't tell us what's missing," Jon says.
"No," the custodian says.
"Or why it was removed."
"No."
"Or whether it would change anything we've read today."
"No."
I look at the line again. "But nobody can say this is the complete record."
The custodian looks at me.
"Not anymore."
"I want that in writing."
"The sheet?"
"No. From you. That we found this today and what it means for the inventory."
She considers that for a moment. "All right."
She goes back to her desk. While she writes, Freya is still reading the receiving papers and Jon goes back to the inventory. I sit there looking at the same four lines.
Ten minutes later, the custodian brings the visit record over and reads it to us before she signs it.
It identifies the intake sheet and records that material had been removed before the inventory began.
It also records that the archive cannot determine from the surviving receiving papers what was removed, who removed it, or where it went.
She adds our request for the Luftemilen account books so we can check for a second seal matrix.
"You'll get a copy before you leave," she says. "I'm sending one to the Council tonight."
At the door, the clerk reads every page of our notes while we wait. Freya stands beside me quietly counting off what she wants to request next on her fingers. Account books. Receiving papers. Catalogue records.
"Was it what you wanted?" Jon asks.
"I don't know." The clerk hands my notes back, and the custodian puts the signed visit record on top. I look down at the stack. "I liked the window-glass receipt."
Jon smiles. "I thought you might."
The iron door closes behind us, and then the third, and the second, and the first. We come up into the lower corridor, where Luke is waiting across from the stairs.
He straightens when he sees me. "Well?"
"The inventory was never complete," I tell him. "Not from the first day. It says so in the clerk's own handwriting."
He looks at the papers in my hand, then at the signature on the top page.
"They put that in writing?"
"She did. A copy goes to the Council tonight."
Luke takes my hand.
I keep the papers in the other one all the way up the stairs.